A singular achievement, “Ordinary Notes” explores profound questions about loss and the shapes of Black life that emerge in the wake. In a series of 248 notes that gather meaning as we read them, Christina Sharpe skillfully weaves artifacts from the past—public ones alongside others that are poignantly personal—with present realities and possible futures, intricately constructing an immersive portrait of everyday Black existence. The themes and tones that echo through these pages, sometimes about language, beauty, memory, sometimes about history, art, photography, and literature—always attend, with exquisite care, to the ordinary-extraordinary dimensions of Black life.
"[Sharpe's] most liberating and poetic experiment yet. Made up of 248 individual notes, it is a deft blend of memoir, theory, archival documents and lyrical reflections on her daily life . . . The notes build in momentum and assemble themselves into a mosaic that holds the relentless terror of Black life as well as its undeniable beauty . . . If there's an argument at the center of Ordinary Notes,
Jenna Wortham, The New York Times Magazine
"Both individually and in their totality, these entries exemplify what it looks like to care and be cared for, to mother, to be mothered and to mourn fiercely, and at all times to bear witness: to behold and be held by what beauty persists even within the enclosure of an anti-Black world."
